God knows, the mood I'm in. I want to drink the day to death. Trying to recall something my Dad said...After my mother died, my father did stretching exercises. I would come down for breakfast in my school uniform and see him in the kitchen, wearing his white vest and Arsenal shorts. He would do sit ups, press ups and, at first, star jumps. You've got to be fit at the end, he'd say. That's what I was trying to remember. To be fit at the...But at the time, I wasn't really listening. To be fair, he didn't say it every day. But he said it enough so that by the time of my  ' O ' levels, I was alert to the change. And again, to be fair, he didn't say this very much either, perhaps once or twice. You've got to be fit at the end, son. So you can tell your side of it. It took him seven years of sit ups to get there. But what's that got to do with me? I've had an easier life than him and, besides, there's no flies on me. There's nothing I won't readily admit to. My Dad was a hidden man, yet keen on his own longevity. I always felt he was waiting for all his contemporaries to die and then, only then, would he open his mouth. It seemed that having the last word, having history on your side, was the only thing that mattered. Inevitably, as he got older the desire for a final, definitive statement about life, his life, began to wane. Everyone who cared was dead and those who weren't, by definition, didn't care. He'd missed the boat, or so it seemed to me. Yet, he was too subtle to refuse my requests to speak about the past- and having a therapist for a son couldn't have helped- but he always managed to find a curious, spontaneous digression. By the time I left for university I was listening to classical music and knew there was a thousand years of baggage I didn't know anything about. It was around this time that I was taking coaches to Watford, Aldershot and Basingstoke- where I would settle down into my seat and scan the audience, looking for another mother.